Mom's Letters

In May of 2020, while we were starting Month 2 of sheltering in place---if we weren't deemed essential workers (remember doing grocery shopping is masks at local restaurants? I do! We got arugula and fancy cheese from an Italian restaurant down the street...)---my mother started sending letters in the mail. She let us know that she was trying to do her part to help keep the postal service solvent, and getting physical letters is exciting.

Her plan was to send letters to me, to my brother Dan, and to our adopted homey Norm, and postcards to all four of the grandkids (Norman, Simon, Cass, and Camille, who was only a few months old when she started). And her plan was to do this every week until she lost steam or interest or energy.

And she still hasn't lost steam or interest or energy. So 3+ years in (nearly 170 weeks in a row!), we've received an enveloped letter and two postcards. And because I'm a paperwaste-packrat, I saved nearly every letter:

This stack is a Russian-literature scale epic of the minutiae of, er, my mom's life. I love the letters. Imagine sitting at a computer everyday and writing a paragraph summarizing that day. And then doing it again for rest of the week. Then printing the week's summary out and mailing it away. And then keep doing it for years. You may imagine the mundanity tsunami-ing a reader. But the pacing, the events, the beefs---major and minor---add to the beauty of everyday life.

At first, as we would read them, I would get a weird sense of: why would this be shared? Then, as the weeks went on, as they turned into months, and as the pile grew and the months stretched into years, the letters would make us laugh. We'd laugh for a few different reasons: sometimes the mundane would end up incidentally profound; sometimes the stories were genuinely amusing, as my mom's a funny person in her own right; and sometimes the absurd difficulty in running down the minutiae of daily life just leads one to crack up.

We all have things and activities in our lives that we find exciting. But I'd wager that many of us think that those exciting activities and things are buried in the mundane. From what I've heard from the masses, it sounds like one of life's primary goals is to survive the mundanity, to persevere, to just make it to the next stretch of excitement. And that's the connection these letters makes with any reader: we can all see ourselves getting frustrated at a grocery store or with a coworker, we can all feel the dread of possibly having to move and then dealing with the hassle of actually moving.

Who hasn't ever been annoyed with their partner but still happy to be on the adventure with them? Who hasn't ever had to bite their tongue in someone's presence for myriad reasons (maybe they're your supervisor and wildly ignorant; maybe they're a stranger and you're not sure if they're a lunatic, et al)? Who hasn't had to deal with getting old and how aging effects their joints? (Well, eh, kids obviously...)

It's also pretty neat to see ones-self in the stories and anecdotes. A holiday visit here, a trip to Legoland there. Please give so-and-so a call, or send this person a card. This person's sick, this one got a new dog, a grandson's marching band is competing for trophies...the prosaic mosaic of life, in a huge stack, becomes a poem.

Over the last few years the postcards have also stacked up. The stack got so high that the clutter was eventually dealt with: some came to my work to be handed out or stapled to the wall; some were tacked up here; many were destroyed by young hands and confined to the trash. 

Also, over the years, babies were born and elders passed on. (Love you always Auntie Erm! Welcome to the world of air-breathing Enzo and Luna!) The pandemic still seethes in the background, mostly becoming endemic, but people seemed to be different. Less willing to put up with shit. Workers are having a moment. As office workers began to be forced back to the office full-time, laborers and white-collared unions started to fight back. Teachers standing with service workers in LA; entertainment writers; actors and crew workers; auto workers in Detroit; Kaiser workers...

Not sure if those changes could have been accomplished without the severity of the global shutdown. It wasn't the wholesale change some of us wanted, but it's better than before. The status quo may have shifted.

And through it all, documenting one woman's interior, the granular activities of a week's worth of days, my mom's letters persist. And they're beautiful. And, come to think of it, there's probably one in my mailbox downstairs right now. I'll go get in a minute, and read it out-loud (as we do here), and then add it to the stack. Three years on...